On the Web

Profile Information

I've been involved in online marketing for over 8 years now. In fact, I remember thinking how cool I was by building web content using html tables. Yeah, anyway. I've manged paid search accounts for most of those years and I've been knee-deep in SEO for nearly as long. There's also that social media stuff that I've been dabbling in for the last few years.

Full Name

Jason Cook

Display Name

JasonCook

Job Title

SEO & PPC Professional

Company

The Search Guy

Type of Work

Independent

Location

Charlotte, NC

Favorite Thing About SEO

I enjoy the near-constant evolution of SEO. What worked today may work more, less or not at all tomorrow. That can be frustrating. And it can be completely awesome.

Blog Comments & Posts

Most everyone wants to be great, right? Why not. But in your pursuit of greatness, sometimes it is helpful to take a step back. Before we set out to conquer the world of search, let's first look at 3 simple things that will help you, as a search marketer, to not flat-out suck. That's reasonable, right?

That sounds like a pretty smart plan. Allows you to prove the business impact of SEO (which, sadly, many still question or don't understand) while also building a little goodwill with the client. In the long run, that probably drives more revenue for you than charging for every little chunk of dev time/resources.

Thank YOU for commenting and for finding the post useful. As long as your different departments are engaging each other in conversation, I think you're off to a good start. And honestly, you're ahead of half the other agencies/companies, most likely!

Ah, wouldn't we all like to know the answer to that. I think the straight answers is: you don't. that is you don't 'not suck'. Learning from those moments of 'suck' can be pretty handy in the years to come though!

Thanks Kane! It is very easy to get lost in the "geek speak" of SEO and then get frustrated when executives fail to grasp the importance of SEO. Amazing how quicky that will (usually) change when you start speaking their language!

nice work, Michael (and Josh and Bill). I'm glad to see that Russ broached the patent-doesnt-equal-usage caveat. Your response is also valid - but I think perhaps Russ (and my) point there is that this type of headless broswer activity probably hasn't been occuring for years and years.

But as you said, there is quite a bit of evidence that it is now happening. The patents, the Webmaster videos and conference comments regarding Instant Preview, Javascript, and link/content placement on a page are all compelling arguments that Google has left the text-only Penguin behind and they are viewing web documents through a user's eyes.

Really cool feature and thanks for the great coverage of it, Casey. I really hope Google will expose this in API format quickly. While it is great, as you point out, to look for influencer behavior in individual posts, it would be amazingly helpful to view aggregate behavior across thousands of posts.
For instance, maybe your example above was the ONLY time that Avinash re-posted Michael's content. If that were true, then maybe he isn't a priority target. But if you could see that 40% of his posts are shared by Avinash...well, you've found yourself an influencer!
Thanks,
Jason

The Real Time Referrer is great concept as well. Too often, I think we focus so much on building links that ideas like this get pushed down the priority list. What's the point in creating great content, getting attribution for that content, only to have Google not recognize the attribution, right?

Nice work, Rand. Sometimes, a picture really helps to drive home (and simplify) a concept. I really dig the 4th illustration regarding the similar keyword strategy.

As search engines continue to advance in how they parse content (through topic modeling/LDA, etc.) - I think it only makes sense to consolidate keywords with similar intent into a singular web document.

Great stuff, sir. Great stuff.
The pull of visual elements is, honestly, stronger than I would have assumed. Given that we know Adwords is the cash cow for Google, it is interesting to think about how they may try and leverage data like this in future ad units. The Adwords site links were a big intrusion on the organic real estate, but what happens if/when paid ads become more visual? Would a paid ad with a video thumbnail garner the same visual fixation? I don't know, but it's not going to shock me if Google gives us the opportunity to find out soon!